Previews

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

It also appears that the death animations have been toned down. Lemarchand mentioned that there had been some complaints regarding the "excessiveness" of pirate and mercenary deaths, and some found the flopping around to be a bit much. It wasn't a huge complaint of ours; we were more concerned about it taking multiple shots to the head to drop an enemy more than how spastically he died, but we're fine with the changes. Except, Lemarchand said, for the sniper rifle and grenades, the likes of which you can watch in our video clips.

We're also happy to see that there are more animations in place so that you can differentiate wounded enemies from non-wounded ones. It was something that we occasionally noticed during our last demo in the courtyard section, as mercenaries would flank in large numbers, and it was tough to tell who we'd already injured. There has also been some weapons tuning. Look for rifles such as the AK-47 to give you a faster rate of fire, but with less damage, while handguns will give you more stopping power up close, but with much slower reload times.

We also got the skinny on more regarding the game's visuals. It looks like the final product will come in at thirty frames per second, and it runs natively in 720p. However, unlike last year's issues regarding Resistance playback on older HD sets that only rendered 1080i or 480p (thus downscaling that game to 480p), Naughty Dog has ensured that Uncharted will also support 1080i output. It also looks like as of now, the cinematics are mostly done, but haven't been completely finalized. Also, the game is still being bug tested, but we've been told that Naughty Dog's beta process turns around faster than many developers, so the game's likely closer to completion than the build we played last week.

While we've given lots of positive coverage to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, we've also been very quick to point out what issues Naughty Dog needed to address. The team seems to have done a fine job tweaking things to address most of our major gripes. While the game isn't finished and we can't pass judgment until it hits stores, we've seen most of our problems with the game addressed. Getting hands-on with a new build that tweaks the difficulty, balances weapons and allows for us to see where we've wounded enemies has gone a long way in boosting our confidence in the game. We'll see how it all pans out once we've got review code.